Sleeve notes
I wanted to open this record by burning a building down and close it the same way, and the reason it doesn't end there is that I went on tour first.
Here's what changed. Collapse is an event. You can put an event in a chorus. Thousands of people can scream an event at you in a room and everybody goes home shaking and nothing is different on Monday. I've watched that happen from the stage more times than I'm comfortable printing. It's a great feeling and it is not the same thing as a result.
Solidarity isn't an event. It's a practice. It's boring. It's folding chairs in a rented room, it's somebody bringing the wrong coffee, it's the ninth meeting about the same grievance, it's who's covering the shift while you're at the meeting. There is no drop in it. I spent the back half of this album trying to write hooks for that anyway, because if I can't make the unglamorous part singable then I'm just selling you the fun part, and the fun part is the part they can sell back to you.
So: side one is the fantasy. Side two is what I found out.
I'm not going to pretend I'm outside any of this. I have a distribution deal I don't love. I rent a house by the month that costs more than my mother's building. I pay my band above scale and I still signed things that made me uncomfortable, and both of those facts are on this record because leaving one of them off would make it propaganda. Somebody printed my paycheck too.
Track nine is called "MUTUAL AID (NOT MERCH)" and that parenthesis is the whole album. Buy the shirt if you want the shirt. Don't mistake the shirt for the thing.
Thank you to the four people who run my life, to the workers at every venue on the last run who told me what their contracts actually say, and to my father, who was laid off by people who have never once had to learn anybody's name.
Play it loud. Then go to the meeting.
— Mercedes